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Printable
Version of Summa 3:Beethoven's Symphony #9 (1824)
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Musical Examples |
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| Beethoven's
Symphony # 9 --Text for Beethoven's Symphony #9 (Schiller's "Ode to Joy")(trans. Steven Ledbetter) |
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O Freunde, nicht
diesen Tone! |
O friends, not these
tones! |
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Freude, schoner Gotterfunken, |
Joy, fair divine
spark, |
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Wem der grosse Wurf
gelungen, |
Whoever has won in
that great gamble |
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Freude trinken alle
Wesen |
All creatures drink
of joy |
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Froh wie seine Sonnen
fliegen |
As joyously as His
suns fly |
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Freude, schoner Gotterfunken, |
Joy, fair divine
spark, |
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Seid umschlungen,
Millionen! |
Be embraced, ye millions! |
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Ihr sturtz nieder,
Millionen! |
Do you fall headlong,
o millions? |
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Freude, schoner Gotterfunken, |
Joy, fair divine
spark, |
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Seid umschlungen,
Millionen! |
Be embraced, ye millions! |
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Ihr sturtz nieder,
Millionen! |
Do you fall headlong,
o millions? |
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Freude, Tochter aus
Elysium! |
Joy, daughter of
Elysium! |
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Seid umschlungen,
Millionen! |
Be embraced, ye millions! |
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Freude, schoner Gotterfunken, |
Joy, fair divine
spark, |
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Readings |
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Anyone who has not yet had
the opportunity to make a close and detailed study beforehand of this
extraordinarily important composition faces great difficulty in coming
to grips with it now, on hearing it for the first time. A not altogether
inconsiderable proportion of the audience is likely to be in that very
position. Some attempt may therefore be admissible to proffer them here,
if not an aid to absolute understanding of Beethoven's masterpiece-- truly
possible only as a product of the individual's own inner perceptions--then
some intimations which may at least ease recognition of the work's technical
ordering of events. For, in view of its unique character and utterly unapproached
novelty, such recognition might otherwise elude the listener who is less
well prepared, and who is hence more likely to become confused. Renunciation!--Learn, man, to forgo!Noble defiance is displayed against this powerful enemy, stout-hearted courage in a resistance which by the middle of the movement amounts to open combat with the opponent. We seem to discern two mighty wrestlers, each ultimately withdrawing from the fray, invincible. In isolated flashed of light, we glimpse the melancholy sweet smile of fortune, which appears to seek us. We strive to possess it, but our foe, with malicious force, prevents us from reaching it, concealing us under its jet-black wing. Even our vision of that far-off beneficience is blocked, and we sink back into a sombre brooding that rouses us once again to defiant resistance, to new struggles against the malevolent demon. So the elements that contribute to the restless motion of this wonderful piece of music are might, resistance, aspiration, yearning, hope, near-attainment, collapse once again, renewed questing, battle re-engaged--yet from time to time it sinks back into that prolonged state of utter joylessness conveyed by Goethe in the words: Yet, each new day I shudder when I wake,At the close of the movement, this sombre, hapless mood, magnified to gigantic proportions, seems to engulf all, intending, in its fearful, imposing majesty, to take possession of this world, which God created for--joy. Second movement No sooner do we hear the pulsing rhythm of this second movement than we are swept up by a whirlwind of exhiliration. The moment we enter this new world, we are snatched away into frenzied, fevered activity. It is as if, driven by despair, in headlong flight, we are caught in constant questing for some new, unknown good fortune, since the old one that used to smile on us distantly seems to have been eclipsed and lost for ever. Goethe articulates a compulsion perhaps not inappropriate to this, in the words: I do not ask for joy.With the precipitous arrival of the middle section, one of those scenes of earthly merriment and pleasant delights opens up before us suddenly. There is just a hint of country-bumpkin boisterousness in the simple, often repeated theme, a naivety, a comfortable complacency that brings to mind Goethe's depiction of homely happiness:
But so narrow a range of pleasures
as this cannot be the goal of our ceaseless quest for fortune and the
noblest joy. Our gaze drifts swlowly from the scene before us; we turn
away, submit anew to the restless impulse, the escape from despair, which
drives us unremittingly forward to seek the state of happiness that--alas!--
we are destined not to find. For at the end of the movement we come once
again upon that scene of comfortable jollity that we have already encountered,
and from which this time we retreat in unseemly haste upon realization.
This memory in turn stirs up
the sweet nostalgia that is so beautifully expressed in this movement's
second theme, to which we could not unsuitably underlay Goethe's
words:
It personifies love's yearning,
to which the first theme, itself now made ardent by expressive embellishment,
responds, inspiring hope and sweet tranquility. Hence, when the second
theme returns, it is as if love and hope were intertwined in an embrace
so as to let the full force of their solace soothe our troubled spirit.
Thus the heart, still palpitating,
seems to want to fend them off with faint resistance. But their sweet
strength is greater than our already weakened defences; conquered, we
throw ourselves into the arms of these lovely harbingers of purest bliss.
Ah yes! The wounded heart appears
to recuperate, with mounting strength and mustering of courage, as the
near-triumphant passage perhaps betrays toward the movement's close. But
recovery is not without relapse, not without return of past upheavals.
Each spasm of the old pain is soothed and suppressed by that propitious
magical power, before which, as lightning dies in final flickers, the
fading storm at last abates.
The final movement having begun
in this way, Beethoven's music takes on a noticeably oratorical quality.
What it has maintained for the first three movements it now abandons,
namely the characteristic features of pure instrumental music, identifiable
as an infinite and indefinite mode of expression. Something definite is
now demanded if this work is to continue as music--a decision such as
can be voiced only in human speech. We may marvel at how the master renders
inevitable the advent of human speech and tongue through this vehement
instrumental double-bass recitative, which almost breaking the bounds
of absolute music already, turns its potent, passionate eloquence upon
the other participants, challenging them to decision. It slips at last
itself into a song-like theme, the simple flow of which, as if in some
joyous stately procession, draws the other instruments along with it,
swelling to a mighty climax. This is, it turns out, the last attempt to
express in purely instrumental terms a state of happiness that is settled,
serene and joyful. But the spirit of rebellion proves incapable of such
restraint. It surges and subsides in foaming waves like a raging sea,
and the wild, chaotic shriek of ungratified passion crowds in on our ears
more clamorously than before. At that moment, a human voice rings out
with the clear, confident articulateness of speech to quell the instrumental
rout. We scarcely know which to marvel at the more: the bold stroke of
inspiration, or the colossal naivety of the composer, in calling on the
voice to defy the instruments thus: [Quotes from the symphony's text will follow the translation used in this module. In the original German, they rhyme and follow poetic meter.]
Let there be light in the chaos!
These words bring with them a sure and unequivocal utterance in which
we, borne thus far by the now subjugated forces of instrumental music,
may at last hear expressed with ultimate clarity the vision of agelong
bliss that open before our tortured quest for joy.
Courageous, warlike sounds
now drift our way; we seem to spy a troop of youths approaching, with
boisterous heroics expressed in words:
An exuberant battle ensues,
depicted all by instruments. We see the youths hurl themselves valiantly
into the fray--the spoils of which are joy. Once more we feel impelled
to invoke words by Goethe:
The victory, though never in
doubt, is won. The exertions of the day give way to smiles of joy. Joy
exults at the thought of happiness newly achieved.
Amidst the highflown sentiment
of joy, proud breasts now swear a vow of universal brotherhood.
We turn in ardent fervor from the embrace of all humankind to the great
Creator of Nature, whose beneficient being we with clear heart and mind
attest; yes--whom, in a moment of supreme rapture as the blue ether seems
to part for us, we fancy we espy:
It is as if we became heirs through revelation to the seraphic belief that every man is created for joy. In all the force of strong conviction, we cry across to one another:
and:
For in the bond of universal
brotherhood, consecrated by God as it is, we are free to taste the
purest joy. Now we can respond, not merely in the thrall
of awesome emotions but also in the knowledge of a bountiful truth revealed
to us--now we can respond to the question:
with the answer:
Our long-sought happiness achieved,
our childlike love of joy regained, we now surrender ourselves to their
delights. Ah! Our guilelessness of heart regained, joy folds its velvet
wing o'er us in benediction.
To the gentle delights of happiness
in joy now succeeds jubilation. As we clasp the world to our breast, excitement
and exultation fill the air like the thundering of the heavens and the
roaring of the seas, set in perpetual motion and healing vibration, which
quicken the earth and preserve it for the joy of men, to whom God
gave the world so that he might find happiness there.
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2. J. W. N. Sullivan on Beethoven's Symphony #9 In the Choral movement of
the ninth symphony Beethoven is in less exalted regions [than in his Mass
in D]. Here he finds a solution of his intolerable yearning by making
himself one with the whole human family, considered as the children of
a Heavenly Father. The solution is a natural one, and is apparently as
"lofty" as could be desired, but it is nevertheless felt as an inadequate
culmination of the spiritual process portrayed in the first three movements.
It is usual to attribute this inadequacy to the employment of the human
voice. It is doubtful, however, whether this is the real reason. It is
rather that we feel that the spirit which has climbed up the heights of
those three movements should now, like Moses on Sinai, be granted a vision
of God Himself. To turn back from the serene, unearthly heights of that
great Adagio to the warm human world of humanitarian ideals and optimistic
rejoicings, is to disappoint our expectation of, and craving for, some
ultimate sublimity. That the human voice alone is not responsible is obvious
from the Mass. The cause lies deeper, in the very character of the music.
The aspiration expressed in the Choral movement, lofty as it is, is not
an adequate culmination of the experiences described in the first three
movements. That Beethoven himself felt this inadequacy is nearly certain
from the evidence we have, and also from the fact that he had the greatest
difficulty in making a plausible bridge passage to the last movement from
the other three.
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3. Donald Francis Tovey on Beethoven's Symphony #9 If a great work of art could
be made responsible for all subsequent failures to imitate it, then Beethoven
might have had cause for doubting whether the opening of his Ninth Symphony
was worth the risk. It is a privilege of the greatest works of art that
they can, if they will, reveal something gigantic in their scale, their
range, and their proportions as the very first glimpse or moment. This
power is quite independent of the possibility that other works may be
larger; it is primarily a matter of proportion, and the actual size enters
into the question only when the work of art is brought by some unavoidable
accident into relation with the actual size of the spectator. Thus Macaulay
once shrewdly observed that the size of the Great Pyramid was essential
to its sublimity, `fo what could be more vile than a pyramid thirty feet
high?' And thus the faithful reproduction of the noblest proportions will
not give sublimity to an architectural model that you can put under a
glass case....
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4. Richard Taruskin on Beethoven's Symphony #9 For a century and a half and
more now, Beethoven's "Symphonie mit Schluss-chor uber Schiller's Ode
`An die Freude'" ["Symphony with closing chorus on Schiller's Ode "To
Joy"] has surely been the most strenuously resisted masterpiece in the
canon of symphonic music. Immediately notorious, it was received with
skepticism wherever it was performed in the early years of its existence,
as Robin Wallace has shown in his fascinating documentary study, Beethoven's
Critics, which traces the reception of Beethoven's music during the
composer's lifetime and for a short time thereafter. Throughout the nineteenth
century, hostile voices continued to be raised against it. For Louis Spohr,
who had known Beethoven in Vienna in his youth, and played under his baton,
the Ninth was a monstrosity that could only be explained in terms of its
creator's deafness: His constant endeavor to be original and to open new paths, could no longer as formerly, be preserved from error by the guidance of the ear. Was it then to be wondered at that his works became more and more eccentric, unconnected, and incomprehensible? ... Yes! I must even reckon the much admired Ninth Symphony among them, the three first movements of which, in spite of some solitary flashes of genius, are to me worse than all of the eight previous Symphoniesm the fourth movement of which is in my opinion so monstrous and tasteless, and in its grasp of Schiller's Ode so trivial, that I cannot even now understand how a genius like Beethoven's could have written it. I find in it another proof of what I already remarked in Vienna, that Beethoven was wanting in aesthetical feeling and in a sense of the beautiful. For Fanny Mendelssohn, who
heard it under her brother's direction on its Dusseldorf premiere in 1836,
the symphony was "so grand and in parts so abominable, as only the work
of the greatest composer could be,...a gigantic tragedy with a conclusion
meant to be dithyrambic, but falling from its height into the opposite
extreme--into burlesque." It was the Ninth that gave maximum credence
to the complaint confided by the nineteen-year-old Schubert to his diary
against "that eccentricity [of Beethoven's] which joins and confuses the
tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with
howlings and the holiest with harlequinades."
The last clause is a warning,
to those inclined to pursue Original Intent, that the meaning of the Ninth--or
any other text or artwork--depends "both on the tradition in which it
was composed and the tradition that it has generated," the latter tradition
having arisen precisely out of the inadequacy of the former to account
fully for the work. Why does the kettledrum practically drown out
the first movement's recapitulation? Why does the submediant (Bb)
replace the more usual mediant (F) as the symphony's antipodal tonal region?
Why do the horns have their strange solos in the first and third movements,
and why are there four of them..? [Taruskin's point is that, from the
point of view of music of the time, these are eccentric musical behaviors
for which there are no neat explanations.] A multiplicity of drives converges in the Ninth Symphony's finale...for a theme adequate to represent "Joy, divine spark of the Gods"; for Elysium, with its promise of brotherhood, reconciliation, and eternal life; for a recovery of the classical ideal of humanity united with Nature. And more: for a Deity who transcends any particularizations of religious creed; for a fusion of Christian and Pagan beliefs, a marriage of Faust and Helen. Yet Solomon is careful to affirm
that "the precise nature of Beethoven's programmatic intentions will always
remain open:...the Ninth Symphony is a symbol the totality of whose referents
cannot be known and whose full effects will never be experienced." And
further, most pertinently, that "in refusing to accept the mythic design
as the ultimate or sole meaning of the symphony we remain true to the
nature of music, whose meanings are beyond translation--and beyond intentionality." Meanings like these had not
figured in eighteenth-century musical discourse. That century had its
semiotic codes, all right--its Affektenlehre, its sinfonia caracteristica
(the genre to which the "Pastoral" Symphony [#6] belongs, as do
also, perhaps, the "Eroica" and the Fifth), and so forth. But such embodied
meaning, whether emotive or descriptive, were always public meanings.
No one needs to interpret the "Pastoral" Symphony. If we do need to have
certain eighteenth-century genres interpreted for us by historians--the
expressive conventions of Baroque opera, for example--that is only because
we have lost the code through desuetude, not because it was esoteric.
Some Baroque genres (sacred ones) did, it is true, occasioanlly embody
esoteric meanings of a theological sort, to which hermeneutic techniques
need to be applied, but these were survivals of a pre-Enlightenment aesthetic
and were rejected between Bach's time and Beethoven's. During that time,
moreover, musical illustrations and emotive gestures were delimited by
what was universally taken to be the nature of beauty and the purpose
of art. As Mozart himself insisted, "music, even in the most terrible
situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or
in other words must never cease to be music." Sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished, the great is rugged and negligent; ... beauty should not be obscure, the great ought to be dark and even gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure.The history of music in the nineteenth century could be written in terms of the encroachment of the sublime upon the domain of the beautiful--of the "great" upon the pleasant--to the point where for some musicians, with Wagner at their head, the former all but superseded the latter as the defining attribute of Tonkunst, the art of tones. Quite obviously the Ninth was a milestone--perhaps even the point of departure--along this path. All the adjectives Burke applies to the "great"--vast, rugged, negligent, dark, gloomy, solid, massive--suit its first three movements to perfection, even as the adjectives applied to "beauty"--small, smooth, polished, light, delicate--could not seem less appropriate. Spohr was right after all. Beethoven did lack a sense of beauty. Or rather, he rejected the assumption on which Spohr based his judgement, that to be beautiful--i.e., pleasing--was the only proper aim of art. Even the Eighth Symphony is, by and large, a conventionally "beautiful" piece by comparison with its successor. And here let us take note that as much time separates the dates of completion of the Eighth and the Ninth--twelve years (1812-24)--as those of the Eighth and the First (1800-12). There is just no comparing the Ninth with its fellows, or with any contemporary composition, for that matter. Nicholas Temperly rightly observes, in his New Grove article on the symphony, that the Choral Symphony...can only be treated as a solitary masterpiece, with no immediate predecessor or successor; in this it resembles the symphonies of the radical Romantics...and the immense influence it had was on the late nineteenth-century composers, not on those of its own time. Solitary, vast, awe-inspiring,
the Ninth reminds everyone of a mountain. It makes us uncomfortable. "We
live in the valley of the Ninth Symphony--that we cannot help," says Joseph
Kerman. Why the resignation? Why should we wish it otherwise? Because
of the finale, of course, and the impossible problem of tone it has created,
especially for us in the fallen twentieth century. That it is a catastrophic
descent cannot be denied. Beethoven even tags it so for us, when he has
his baritone asks for something angenehmere--something more pleasing--after
the horror fanfares in which sublimity reaches far past the threshold
of pain. And the pleasure, as the nature of the Joy-theme at once announces,
is to be an eminently public pleasure, annulling the private pain Beethoven
had previously disclosed to us. Kerman calls the theme "half folklike,
blinding in its demagogic innocence." Is this the Elysium to which our
noble quest has delivered us, the realm glimpsed mistily through visionary
modulations amid the crags and ravines of earlier movements? And who are
all this riffraff, with their beery Mannerchore [men's choruses]
and sauerkraut bands? Our brothers? And the juxtaposition of all this
with the disclosure of God's presence "above the stars?" No, it is all
too much!
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5. Susan McClary on Beethoven's Symphony #9 ...Beethoven and Mahler quite
regularly push mechanisms of frustration to the limit, such that desire
in their narratives frequently culminates (as though necessarily) in explosive
violence. This may be one of the factors that cause [them] to be received
as more serious, more virile, more consequential [than Haydn and Handel]:
they don't pull punches, they go all the way to the mat. A man in terror of impotence The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical composition, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devastating....But if Beethoven resists the exigencies of formal necessity at the moment of recapitulation in the opening movement and at the beginning of the final movement, he also finally embraces and perpetuates them, and even raises them to a much higher level of violence. And once his successors in the nineteenth century tasted that combination of desire and destruction, they could not get enough of it.
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